I’m American. Just giving some background to the feeling. There’s some discontent with some western communities (localllama) that Chinese developers have been open weighting all of their models while most western models have been closed weights.
Meta seems to have now stepped out of the running despite being the local LLM catalyst. Anthropic has done nothing. IBM's Granite and Microsoft's Phi are both very far behind. AWS doesn't even attempt to compete. Grok failed to make good on their promise. OpenAI only even entered the game yesterday so it's hard to tell if they're actually serious since they released such an overly censored model that isn't really better than Qwen options and at its smallest still requires a decent computer. Google seems to be the only domestic contender on the level of what Chinese companies are doing and they're being very careful to not cannibalize Gemini with Gemma.
Right now though China is dropping huge improvements across the entire spectrum of model sizes with Qwen, Kimi, DeepSeek, GLM, and Yi. We've also got Mistral doing competitive self-hosted models too, but they're French. Local AI tooling is plainly _not_ being driven forwards by the United States.
China has a business model where you can lose money and it doesn't matter. The state's modus operandi is just fund things until the leader changes his mind about it.
This is why the Chinese labs are so open, they don't ever need to make a profit, they just need to make good AI.
Xi Jinping has set AI as a national priority. This means that lenders (Chinese party run banks) will "lend" money to AI orgs with no financial strings attached. No business evaluation needed. This is how China does growth, they just fund it in the direction they want without much attention to profitability or returns. It's how you get billion dollar high speed rail lines that transport 50 people a day along the route.
Despite the many capitalist facets of China, it's core operations are still planned communist economy.
That you do not follow is apparent from your comment. I don't think this will be a productive discussion - you're speaking in such broad generalities about provable facts about specific companies (Alibaba, Baidu, etc.) that it is difficult to respond. Take care.
Sure. The US isn't morally any better on this though. VC backed companies and the "get users, figure out profitability later" strategy that have made outside countries unable to compete have been enabled by the US government tweaking interest rates and the supply value of the dollar. And the US backs all sorts of unprofitable things through grants, contracts, and bail outs.
The US government just hasn't yet found a reason to directly pay for a domestic country to release open models. But it's not like we're above that at all.
There isn't really question of morality here, China simply operates different than the US. US companies will need to provide a return to investors and want a secret competitive edge. Chinese companies will need to provide the state with AI, money isn't a concern.
As for why the US gets all the VC love, it's because the US has an extremely friendly business environment. People leave their home countries to start businesses in the US because of it. Europe has done a pretty good job suffocating their tech industry in comparison.
The US government only plays a relatively minor role in this too, because unlike China the US is not a planned economy.
